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'The 'Ktik are fun,' Byr said. 'They're people, individuals. I've met
thousands of them by now, I suppose. There are something like twenty or
thirty million of them. Lots of new little chums to meet.'
Aist sniggered. 'Don't suppose you can get it off with them, can you?'
Byr glanced at her. 'Never tried. Doubt it.'
'Boy, you were some swordsman, Byr,' Aist said. 'I remember you on the
Quietly
, first time we met. I'd never met anyone so focused.' She laughed. 'On
anything! You were like a natural force or something; an earthquake or a
tidal wave.'
'Those are natural disasters,' Byr pointed out with feigned frostiness.
'Well, close enough then,' Aist said, laughing gently. She glanced slyly,
slowly, at the other woman. 'I suppose I'd have found myself in the firing
line if I'd stuck around longer.'
'I imagine you might,' Byr said in a tired, resigned voice.
'Yup, could all have turned out completely different,' Aist said.
Byr nodded. 'Or it could all have turned out exactly the same.'
'Well, don't sound so happy about it,' Aist said. 'I wouldn't have minded.'
She leant over the parapet and spat delicately again, moving her head just so,
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flicking the spittle outward. This time it landed on the gravel path which
skirted the tower's stone base. She made an approving noise and looked back
at Byr, wiping her chin and grinning. She looked at Byr, studying his face
again. 'It's not fair, Byr,' she said. 'You look good no matter what you are.'
She put one hand out slowly towards
Byr's cheek. Byr looked into her large dark eyes.
One moon started to disappear behind a ragged layer of high cloud and a small
wind picked up, smelling of rain.
A test, for her friend
, Byr thought, as the other woman's long fingers gently stroked
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soft. But the fingers were trembling.
Still a test; determined to do it but nervous about it
. Byr put her hand up and held the woman's fingers lightly. She took it as a
signal to kiss her.
After a little while, Byr said, 'Aist& ' and started to pull away.
'Hey,' she said softly, 'this doesn't mean anything, all right? Just lust.
Doesn't mean a thing.'
A little later still Byr said, 'Why are we doing this?'
'Why not?' Aist breathed.
Byr could think of several reasons, asleep in the stony darkness beneath them.
How
I have changed
, she thought.
But then again not that much.
, VII
Ulver Seich strolled through the accommodation section of the
Grey Area.
At least there was a bit more strolling to be done on the GCU; had she come
here straight from the family house on Phage it would have seemed horribly
cramped, but after the claustro-phobic confines of the
Frank Exchange of Views
, it appeared almost spacious (she had spent so little time on Tier, and
passed the small amount of time she had there in such a frenetic haste of
preparation that it hardly counted. As for the nine-person module -
ugh
!).
The
Grey Area's interior - built to house three hundred people in reasonable if
slightly compact comfort, and now home only to her, Churt Lyne and
Genar-Hofoen -
was actually pretty interesting, which was an unexpected plus on this
increasingly disillusioning expedition. The ship was like a museum to
torture, death and genocide; it was filled with mementoes and souvenirs from
hundreds of different planets, all testifying to the tendency towards
institutionalised cruelty exhibited by so many forms of intelligent life.
From thumbscrews and pilliwinks to death camps and planet-swallowing black
holes, the
Grey Area had examples of the devices and entities involved, or of their
effects, or documentary recordings of their use.
Most of the ship's corridors were lined with weaponry, the larger pieces
standing on the floor, others on tables; bigger items took up whole cabins,
lounges or larger public spaces and the very biggest weapons were shown as
scale models. There were thousands of instruments of torture, clubs, spears,
knives, swords, strangle cords, catapults, bows, powder guns, shells, mines,
gas canisters, bombs, syringes, mortars, howitzers, missiles, atomics, lasers,
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field arms, plasma guns, microwavers,
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thunderbolters, knife missiles, line guns, thudders, gravguns, monofilament
warps, pancakers, AM projectors, grid-fire impulsers, ZPE flux-
polarisers, trapdoor units, CAM spreaders and a host of other inventions
designed for - or capable of being turned to the purpose of producing death,
destruction and agony.
Some of the cabins and larger spaces had been fitted out to resemble torture
chambers, slave holds, prison cells and death chambers (including the ship's
swimming pool, though after she'd pointedly mentioned that she liked to start
each day with a dip, this was now being converted back to its original
purpose). Ulver supposed these& stage-sets& were a little like the famous
tableaux the
Sleeper
Service was supposed to contain, except that the
Grey Area's had no bodies in them
(something of a relief, in the circumstances).
Like a lot of people, she had always wanted to see the real thing. She had
asked if she and Churt Lyne might go aboard the GSV when Genar-Hofoen did, but
her request had been turned down; they would have to stay on the
Grey Area until the
GCU could find somewhere both safe and unrestricted to deposit them. What
made it all even more annoying in a way was that the
Grey Area expected it would be keeping in close contact with the
Sleeper Service;
inside its field envelope, if it was allowed to. So near and yet so far and
all that crap. Whatever; it looked like she wouldn't get to see even the
remnants of the famous craft's tableaux vivants, and would have to make do
with the
Grey Area and its tableaux mortants.
She thought they might have been more effective if they had contained the
victims or the victims and tormentors, but they didn't. Instead they
contained just the rack, the iron maiden, the fires and the irons, the
shackles and the beds and chairs, the buckets of water and acid and the
electric cables and all the serried instruments of torture and death. To see
them in action you had to stand before a nearby screen.
It was a little shocking, Ulver supposed, but kind of aloof at the same time;
it was like you could just inspect this stuff and get some idea of how it
worked and what it did (though watching the screens wasn't really advisable;
she watched one for a few seconds and nearly lost her breakfast; and it wasn't
even humans who were being tortured) and you could sort of ride it out; you
could accept that this had happened and feel bad about it all right, but at
the end of it you were still here, it hadn't happened to you, stopping this
sort of shit was exactly what SC, Contact, the
Culture was about, and you were part of that civilisation, part of that
civilising& and that sort of made it bearable. Just. If you didn't watch the
screens.
Still, just holding a little iron device designed to crush the sort of fingers
that were holding it, looking at a knotted cord whose twin knots - once the
cord was tightened
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were set at just the right distance to compress and burst the sort of eyes
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